In fairness to chimps...

In yesterday's post, I said some unflattering things about our cousins the chimpanzees (not that I don't say worse things about humans most days). Here's the other side of the coin. If we inherited our capacity for intra-species violence from our chimplike common ancestor, it looks like we also got a sense of fairness from them too. It's always a mixed bag.

SCISSORBILL was a term used by the Industrial Workers of the World back in the day to describe workers who just didn't get it. The term refers to the bill of a duck, as in cutting off your nose to spite your face. As in low income workers who finally get health care from the Affordable Care Act but support politicians who want to repeal it. Earlier this week, I linked a NY Times article about that. Here's another take on the subject.

CHILD POVERTY. Despite some progress, it got worse in WV in 2013, according to the latest Census data..

War before people

For a long time, there has been a prejudice in the social sciences which tended to view early humans as peaceful noble savages and blame human violence on more recent social structures like capitalism, imperialism and all that. Short version: we used to be cool but now we're crap.

I'm no cheerleader for predatory capitalism or imperialism, but that view turned out to be pretty much perfectly wrong. More and more evidence indicates that the rate of violence as it affects a portion of the human population has actually decreased throughout human history. By a lot. In other words, we may be crappy now, but we were a whole lot more crappy and violent in hunter gatherer societies.

It is also now pretty well established that something like war has long existed in chimpanzee societies and that this is unrelated to human intervention.

You could view that as a downer, but I don't. It shows that we really can make progress and control our historical end evolutionary baggage to some degree. Of course, we're not there yet!

Show up and smile

Earlier this month, presidential candidate Mitt Romney held a rally in Ohio which was intended to show that coal country was solidly behind him. It turns out that those miners who attended were told to do so by their employer. The event was mandatory and unpaid.

Another example of democracy at its finest.

SPEAKING OF COAL, here's some interesting news in the ongoing Upper Big Branch federal investigation.

THE ECONOMY ISN'T GROWING MUCH but poverty is.

WHAT MAKES INEQUALITY WORSE? Declining union membership.

HEALTH CARE REFORM. Most West Virginians favor parts of it.

CULTURE, CUSTOMS AND TRADITION aren't just for humans anymore.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Cui bono?

The Latin phrase "cui bono?" can be loosely translated as "who benefits?" I asked that question recently to a resident of a county that is ground zero in Marcellus Shale natural gas drilling, aside from the companies involved. (By the way, there are a lot of different companies involved in the process. It's not like, say a US Steel plant back in the day where one company does the whole thing. One firm may clear pads, another one drill, another frack, another lay pipe, several others haul equipment, sand and water, etc.)

Here are some of the people identified as benefiting:

*the out of state workers who drive, drill, frack, etc.;

*the owners of businesses like motels, convenience stores, restaurants, and other businesses that cater to the industry and those who work in it;

*big landowners who own the mineral rights to their own land--something that doesn't happen as often as you might think--and who can locate some well pads far enough away from their living quarters to generate some income without ruining their quality of life. Ditto absentee owners.

I had a conversation with a union official yesterday asking about whether local and/on union workers (preferably both) were getting anything out of it. He said that some were, particularly in the pipeline end. Some unions represented at various points in the process are Laborers, Operating Engineers, and Teamsters, with some others.

I'm glad there are some winners outside CEOs and stockholders. But I'd like to see the numbers increase. Better regulation, more protections for the environment, more transparency, more efforts to hire local workers would be a start.

At the risk of being a broken record, West Virginia as a whole could be a winner if we set aside some of the revenue from natural gas to create a Future Fund to help transition our economy beyond mineral extraction.

LIES, TRUTH, THINGS UNSAID AND THE POLITICS OF COAL. Here's a great post from Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo that lays it all on the line.

GO NORTHEAST, YOUNG MAN (OR WOMAN). There's more social mobility there

CHIMPS have culture. And some plan ahead when it comes to stone throwing.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Of various items, including zombies and living in trees

I have mentioned in previous posts about how a certain over-educated daughter of mine is fascinated with the idea of a zombie apocalypse. We happened to share a meal this evening after a karate class and in due time she explained her latest theory about how such zombie eruptions were to be endured.

Her theory suggested that humans revert to living in trees, which presumably zombies would be too stupid to climb. She reasoned that people living there could "pick fruit and catch birds." Again, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.


IT'S OFFICIAL. Some chimps like iPads and computer games.

THE NICER APES. Here's a look at bonobos, who are probably the nicest branch of the great ape tree (which includes us). Too bad we're not descended from them.

TAI CHI can be good for Parkinson's patients.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Feeding the trolls

I understand that it is the custom in Zen Buddhist monasteries to collect any remaining grains of rice after a meal and offer them to the hungry ghosts. Hungry ghosts in the Buddhist conception of the wheel of life and death are those beings who were greedy in previous lives.

In that unpleasant state or realm, one has a huge and empty belly that is always hungry but a tiny throat that can't swallow much. Feeding them is a meritorious act of generosity.

I've come to think of writing op-eds, like this one of mine, as a similar act since putting one in the paper feeds the trolls, which in this case refers to right wingers who lurk around the web in order to attach their remarks to pieces they disagree with like lampreys latching on to fish.

I devoutly hope that this act of providing nourishment will serve me well in my next rebirth.

THE DEATH PENALTY. E.J. Dionne argues that only conservatives can end it.

CLASS WARFARE, revisited.

CHIMPANZEES are just not that into cooperation.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Too little. Too late?

The focus of this blog lately is the nation's current economic mess and how we got there. This is installment 2. Here's #1.

As I argued yesterday, the Great Recession of the last few years was facilitated by 30 years of zombie economics, which consisted of deregulating industry, privatizing services, cutting taxes for the wealthy, and eroding programs that promoted shared prosperity.

In late 2008 and early 2009, Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations enacted policies designed to correct course. First, under Bush's watch, the TARP program or Wall Street bailout was passed. Most people hated it, for good reasons, although it may have actually helped stall the slide of markets and lending institutions and wound up costing less than expected.

The second was the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better know as the stimulus. It was a big bill and a massively mixed bag, consisting of some elements that really helped boost the economy (like extending unemployment insurance, subsidizing COBRA and boosting food stamps) while others that didn't (things like tax cuts for businesses).

Here's the rationale behind it: three things drive economic growth: private spending, business investment and government spending. In a recession, the first two tend to tank, leaving the third to take up the slack.

The main problem with the Recovery Act, as several economists have argued (search this blog for more) is that it wasn't big enough and it didn't place enough focus on direct job creation. At the time it was designed, it was estimated that unemployment would peak at around 8 percent. More than two years later, the rate is still 9.1 nationwide.

The Recovery Act probably did help end the recession in at least a technical sense of helping GDP to stop falling and it did keep millions of Americans from falling into poverty, but it didn't go far enough or last long enough. Now, as it trickles to a halt, we're likely to see more and more layoffs, especially at the state and local level, and more cuts to needed programs and services.

The biggest problem with an inadequate stimulus was political: right wing opponents attempted to brand it as a failure with considerable success and use anger at slow job growth to turn public attention in another direction.

About which more tomorrow.

MORE OF SAME here.

SHOCK DOCTRINE. Don't fall for it (again).

TALKING SENSE. Here's a statement from the AFLCIO on real and bogus crises.

WHAT ABOUT THE TOOTH FAIRY? Some evangelicals are questioning the literal historicity of Adam and Eve.

WHY NOT PEOPLE? A new study suggests that chimpanzees are more generous than previously thought. Perhaps humans are less so.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hot dog

Whose dog is that?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for this urgent canine update from Goat Rope Farm. When I returned home yesterday, a strange dog awaited me.

Actually, it was Arpad, our Great Pyrenees. He's a long haired beast who loves cold weather--the colder the better--which means he's pretty miserable in the WV summer.

However, the Spousal Unit's sister, who has spent years working in animal hospitals, is way better at being a doggie barber than we are and she just happened to be here on a visit. Arpad got a buzz cut. Aside from a puff at the end of his tail (for a lion effect), he could be a Marine recruit.

He's tiny now. I hardly recognize him, but he seems a lot more chipper...if it really is him and not a clever Cylon impersonation (sorry, I've been watching Battlestar Galactica lately).

OK, back to the salt mines...

DAMAGE REPORT. Here's a look at how 30 years of "conservative" rule damaged the American economy.

IGNORING THE UNEMPLOYED. Here's a good editorial about the need for Congress to act to help the unemployed, a frequent subject of rants at this blog.

COUNT THE COSTS. Here's Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo on a new study by the WV Center on Budget and Policy about the impact of coal--benefits as well as costs--on the state budget. And here is his article about it for the printed paper. This ought to be good for another industry hissy fit.

CHIMPANZEE WARS. They happen.

NOT TOO FAR FROM WALDEN, a senior citizen from Concord is battling for a ban on bottled water.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A reality check

The Upper Big Branch mine disaster and related issues have weighed heavily on my mind for the last few weeks and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

In the wake of the disaster, many people, rightly, have wondered why agencies like MSHA aren't more aggressive about shutting down production at dangerous mines.

The reality, at least until this disaster, was that the coal industry and its supporters have pretty much perfected the art of the hissy fit and they have been really good at getting political leaders to fall in line.

My guess is that the reaction to a preventive shutdown by MSHA would have been about the same as what happens when a mining permit is delayed or denied: an all-hands-on-deck order would be sent out to denounce the Obama administration's "war on coal." Everybody who was anybody (or who wanted to be anybody) would have joined in.

WHILE WE'RE AT IT, here's an interesting take on the history of the Upper Big Branch mine from Vanity Fair.

YOU DON'T NEED A WEATHERIZATION MAN to know which way the wind blows. You can just read this op-ed by Paul Miller and yours truly instead.

UNEMPLOYMENT for African-American men is at 20.2 percent, more than double that for whites.

MONKEY LOVE. In the event you've ever wondered whether male chimps use tools to attract females, click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The whips and scorns of time

To be (right) or not to be (left).

For several years I taught pre-GED classes at Head Start centers in southern West Virginia. I used to delight in torturing my students by bringing in different literary selections, having the class read them out loud, and then discussing them.

Of course, there's no way I could have resisted bringing in the most famous lines in English literature. And since Hamlet is the theme here, there's no way I can resist even now. So here goes:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away,
And lose the name of action...

Harold Bloom argues that "this is not a meditation seriously contemplating suicide," but rather the prince hesitating on a course likely to lead to his own death. He has been around the Shakespearean block more times than me and may be right, but I'm not persuaded. Hamlet, after all has already brought up suicide in the first act and things have only gotten worse for him since then.

In any case, while El Cabrero is not too given to depression or thoughts of self-immolation (very often, anyhow), when it did cross my mind, I've always found Hamlet's reasoning to be persuasive.

WV ACTION ALERT. If you live in WV and haven't yet contacted Gov. Manchin and your legislators about modernizing our unemployment system and extending benefits to part time workers and people dealing with domestic violence, sexual assault, and other compelling family reasons, please click here and send a message. It's easy and it's fast. As of last night, over 351 emails have been sent (150 yesterday alone). The bills to draw down $22 million in federal money to do this need to move this week so acting now is crucial.

STIMULATED. Reuters has this to say about the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act:

The massive stimulus package passed last year to blunt the impact of the worst U.S. recession in 70 years created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last three months of 2009, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said on Tuesday.

The package boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.1 percent during that period, CBO said.

FOOD MILES. Here's another item on local foods.

LET'S GO SQUID HUNTING. Sperm whales may hunt them in packs.

IN CASE YOU WERE WONDERING whether chimpanzees can quantify liquids, the answer is yes. Bartenders, beware!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Primeval soup

Lately Goat Rope is looking at the messy but interesting process of how public policy gets made (or doesn't). You'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Before any major new public policy is introduced to the public or placed on the agenda, it often begins as an idea developed by a peculiar human subspecies popularly known as policy wonks.

As John Kingdon put it in Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies,

Picture a community of specialists: researchers, congressional staffers, people in planning and evaluation offices and in budget offices, academics, interest group analysts. Ideas float around in such communities. Specialists have their conceptions, their vague notions of future directions, and their more specific proposals. They try out their ideas on each other by going to lunch, circulating papers, publishing articles, holding hearings, presenting testimony, and drafting and pushing legislative proposals. The process often does take years...and may be endless.

Kingdon compares the development of policy proposals to the biological process of natural selection:

Much as molecules floated around in what biologists call the "primeval soup" before life came into being, so ideas float around in these communities. Many ideas are possible, much as many molecules would be possible. Ideas become prominent and then fade. There is a long process of "softening up": ideas are floated, bills introduced, speeches made; proposals drafted, then amended in response to reaction and floated again. Ideas confront one another (much as molecules bumped into one another) and combine with one another in various ways. The "soup: changes not only through the appearance of wholly new elements, but even more by the recombination of previously existing elements. While many ideas float around in this policy primeval soup, the ones that last, as in a natural selection system, meet some criteria. Some ideas survive and prosper; some proposals are taken more seriously than others.

Believe it or not, ideas actually matter, although it's a long way from conception to implementation.

HEALTH CARE AND THE HOUSE. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says nice things about the Senate compromise on health care reform here.

JOBS AND THE FED. Here's Krugman on what the Federal Reserve can and probably won't do to boost employment.

THE HOLLY AND THE IVY AND MORE are discussed in the latest edition of Notes from Under the Fig Tree.

CHIMPS LIKE US dig music. They also like hugs.

TALKING COAL. Here's Ken Ward's Coal Tattoo post on public reaction to Senator Byrd's recent statement on the future of coal. And here's an item about coal and climate change legislation in the US Senate.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Hanging day

John Brown keeps showing up on this blog from time to time, but today he's here for a reason. This date marks the 150th anniversary of his execution in Charles Town, back when it was still part of Virginia.

Brown was a real Captain Ahab whose white whale was slavery. His monomania, to use a favorite 19th century term for an abnormal fixity of purpose, matched that of Melville's character. And unlike the captain of the Pequod whose quarry escaped, Brown was ultimately if posthumously successful.

As he was leaving the jail for his execution, he handed this message on a to an attendant:

I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.

It is also said that as he sat on what would be his coffin on the wagon ride to the gallows he looked around at the scenery, saying "This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before."

NOT GOOD. This item from The New England Journal of Medicine looks at the consequences of failure to pass health care reform.

CHAMBER OF WHATEVER. WVU-Tech professor and Gazette columnist John David takes the WV Chamber of Commerce to task for urging senators to hold health care legislation hostage over coal mining regulation.

GETTING WARMER. This Reuters article looks at WV's role in making or breaking climate change legislation in the US Senate.

LONELINESS CAN BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH and it might be contagious.

HOW'S YOUR INNER CHIMP? Bill Moyers talks with primate researcher Jane Goodall here.

OLD EUROPE. Here's a look at a lost civilization that thrived in the Balkans around 5,000 years ago.

ACTION ITEM. If you are in the Charleston area Thursday and want to publicly oppose military escalation in Afghanistan, WV Patriots for Peace is sponsoring a vigil from 5:15pm - 6:15pm at Brawley Walkway (across from Chili's on Court St).

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The prodigal returns

We interrupt our regular program to announce that our Great Pyr Arpad, aka Vanilla Iceberg, was located after spending two nights in an undisclosed location. The Spousal Unit found him while checking out some backroads, when he heard the car and ran out of a garage. He even jumped into the car, an action that usually requires an act of Congress.

The gentleman who had been hosting him said "I ain't never seen a dog that big. I been calling him Snowball."

We are glad to have him back and devoutly hope that the 170 wanderer didn't eat anybody important.

Meanwhile, El Cabrero seems to be developing flu-like symptoms, not necessarily of the swinish variety (although others may have their own opinions). It's always something. If posts are sporadic over the next few days that might be why.

NEXT STOP...public option?

CORRECTING THE BIBLE. Here's another item on the conservative effort to excise "liberal bias" from a certain book.

JOHN BROWN'S BODY. Here's the Washington Post on the man who lit the spark.

CHIMPS HELP, especially when they're asked.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Paranoia strikes deep

Senator Rockefeller speaking at a health care town meeting in Charleston. This one was fairly calm.

The theme at Goat Rope this week has been political paranoia, with a special focus on historian Richard Hofstadter's classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The series was inspired in part by today's Whackadoodle political climate and this summer's wild and wooly health care controversy. If this is your first visit, the series started Monday.

As was discussed earlier, there's nothing necessarily new about political paranoia. Today, the trigger may be health care reform. In the past other targets included Freemasonry, the Roman Catholic Church, communist conspiracies, the United Nations, etc.

Taking the long view of history, Hofstadter believed that the tendency to paranoid worldviews is a constant among some people, usually a small minority. But in periods of social strain or major change, these can sometimes erupt into mass movements and political parties.

(Looks like we lucked out...)

He argued that the adherents of such views seem to suffer whether they win or lose. No victory for them is ever complete. Any loss or setback only seems to confirm their darkest imaginings.

Hofstadter concluded by saying that

“We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”

Here’s hoping the latest flare-up of political paranoia won’t cause too much harm.

WILL IT FINALLY HAPPEN? Here's a Gazette editorial on the history of health care reform efforts.

THE CULT OF THE MARKET GOD that dominated much of the field of economics is given a critical review here by Paul Krugman.

TOOL USING ANIMALS? Chimpanzees use more than one.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE OTHER GUY

Caption: RX Sig. A prescription written by Freud himself. His contemporaries probably couldn't read it either.

Aside from links and comments about current events, the theme for this week's Goat Rope is psychology.

El Cabrero can still remember stumbling onto the subject in high school through the writings of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung (I can't remember which came first). At the time, I found the text and pictures of Jung et al's Man and His Symbols intoxicating with all the talk about the collective unconscious and its archetypes.

And as for Sig, after plowing through The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, nothing ever looked the same. That was the work where he discussed what we now call "Freudian" slips of the tongue, mistaken actions, "forgetting," and other actions in which unconscious thoughts and emotions expressed themselves.

If you read about the early history of the psychoanalytic movement, three names are prominent. Aside from Sig and Jung, the Other Guy was Alfred Adler, who is by far the least known. Ironically, Adler's ideas have probably held up better in psychological circles than either of the others. He can be viewed as one of the grandparents of contemporary cognitive psychology and related forms of therapy.

I became interested enough to give Adler a whirl recently after discovering that his approach to psychology is an influence in my daughter La Cabrita's graduate psychology program. Goat Rope verdict: Dude ain't bad.

More about Adler tomorrow--same Bat time, same Bat channel.

WILL IT MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE? US intelligence agencies say that Iran abandoned its quest for nuclear weapons years ago. But then this administration has never allowed facts to get in the way of an unnecessary war.

A NICE IDEA.Bush administration cutbacks in veterans' services have made it hard for some vets to call home when they receive treatment at VA facilities. Veterans for Peace is urging people to buy phone cards for veterans this holiday season.

STOP THE PRESSES. Chimpanzees are better at math than you may think.

FIGHTING FOR SICK DAYS. Allied groups yesterday announced a drive to require paid sick days for workers at WV businesses employing 25 or more people. SEIU is taking the lead, but many other organizations have signed on as well.

WV ONES TO WATCH. A lot of other economic justice issues are percolating in El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia these days. Here's an AP item by Lawrence Messina about concerns over the privatization of the workers' compensation system. Also, on a positive note, an interim legislative committee has supported what labor supporters call the Worker Freedom Bill, which would prohibit employers from requiring workers to attend meetings where they pusy their views on unions, religion, or politics.

PITFALLS OF PERFECTIONISM. Speaking of psychology, this one from the NY Times is interesting.

ON A RELATED NOTE, a mental health study of Katrina survivors finds it has a continuing impact.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED